Kids teacher's conference

Bailey had his middle school conferences last month. It was just an open type of conference. All the teachers were in the gym, and I got to see most of them. They all said Bailey is a bright kid, and doing very well. With the conf. being so early in the year, they really didn't share much information or note any areas of concern yet. His allied arts classes this semester include band, art, music and PE...all of which he was given the grade of P(passing). He has the same teacher, Mrs Veith a good majority of the day, for Math (B+), Spelling (A+), and Communications (A), and he is doing very well, with occassional trouble in understanding math concepts. Sometimes I don't even understand his math homework, so dad has to take over and save the day. Then he has Social Studies (A), which he seems to like, and also likes the teacher, Mr Schmidt, and finally Science (B), which he loves doing all the projects, experiments, and labs. She only had 4 grades in her grade book at the time of conference, so his grade has lots of time to improve.
Bailey is liking middle school to a point, still says he doesn't like school, but I believe he is having a good year so far being in the big school.
He is liking playing his trumpet so far.
I think he mentioned band being his favorite class so far. He practices at home and has shown remarkable improvement....he knows notes, and even these notes are starting to form recognizable songs. Hannah gets annoyed when he practices, which is usually right in the livingroom. So she usually heads upstairs in a huff. I'll have to add a video on here soon, of his accomplishments on the trumpet.
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Hannah's conference was last night, and Steve and I both made it to hers. Yea!
She has a few issues to keep on top of, mostly her social skills. She will again be going to do "groups" with the school social worker once a week for 30 min. She did this last year in Kdg., and it seemed to help some, so we will keep at it.
Hannah just has some shyness when it comes to group settings, and also dealing with adults, so we will keep working at it. I know how it feels, and to see her improve in these areas with some help in the right direction is awesome. I never got much help with my shyness so therefore I had to just grow and learn on my own. She has many friends at school, and I believe most of the girls in her classroom are all close, she has no problems relating to friends and being a friend, and she can even be a little bossy....oops
Other things she needs to work on in that respect is communicating mathamatical thinking, and communication in general classroom discussions.
She consistantly meets grade expections with her writing, it is very neat, but has some issues of still writing capital letters when they should be small, mostly K, P and sometimes E. She doesnt' quite have the lines and spacing down yet.
Spelling tests and reading are her strong points and her grade is occassionally exceeds grade level. She meets once a week in a "reading group" as well, for another way to challenge her. She is reading ALL the time at home and loves it. She has even been reading small chapter books, such as Junie B Jones and several others. Her comprehension of what she reads is slower, but is reading most to all of the words. She needs to work on verbally sounding out the words she doesn't know using her reading stragities, which she tends to do silently in her head, so her teacher is not sure what she is thinking in that respect. We will work more on that at home too, as the same thing happens when she reads to me and gets to a word she doesn't know, she pauses, and seems to be working it out in her head and then impatient mom will give her the word and we move on, we need to work more on sounding out word chunks. She does read along at a good clip and knows most words that I even wonder how she knows.
She is also in classroom rotation classes with the 3 other 1st grade teachers... Health with Mrs Hall (Mileka's mom), Social Studies with Miss Silverberg, Art with Mrs Ophsal and her teacher Mr Karlgaard, does Science. All of those classes she is at grade level in. Math is a little more tricky for her, and for the most part she meets expectations, but has some trouble counting. She has done it to me at home, so I think it was just the day he verbally tested her on it that made the difference in her grade. For example when counting by 10's to 120, she stopped at 100 and the same with by 5's.... and counting by 2's to 50 she stopped at 30. I know she knows these things, but he graded her as "needs improvement", because of her knowledge at the time. PE and Music are also at grade level and she loves music class with Miss Litzau. They have started to work on their songs for the upcoming chrsitmas program, and she is very excited. Hannah really loves school at this stage yet, and rushes home at the end of the day to tell me all about it!!!